AM2 Motherboards-Part 4: ATI Crossfire Xpress 3200

General Performance

With the Memory Controller on the Athlon 64 Processor, Winstone benchmarks are no longer very revealing of motherboard performance. With the same CPU (and the same memory controller on that CPU) both Winstones are tightly clustered. The only deviation from that is that boards that are tweaked for best gaming performance are often near the bottom of a tight range of benchmark performance numbers. The Winstone tests themselves are rapidly becoming dated, and are no longer supported by PC Magazine. While Winstones are still useful in providing real world performance data in CPU testing, we have dropped Winstones from our standard motherboard test suite.


PCMark2005 results for the nine AM2 boards show the Epox 570SLI at the top of the performance chart, followed closely the ASUS M2N32-SLI and the MSI K9A Platinum. The ECS and Foxconn are next in PCM05 performance. These results for the MSI and ASUS are very much in line with other results, as both these boards consistently appear at or near the top of our performance testing.

PCMark05, together with 2 benchmarks that use rendering to test system performance - Cinebench 9.5 and POV-Ray 3.6 - have replaced Winstones for testing general performance. Cinebench 9.5 and POV-RAY 3.6 benchmarks both heavily stress the CPU subsystem while performing graphics modeling and rendering. We utilize the standard benchmark demos in each program along with the default settings. Cinebench 9.5 features two different benchmarks with one test utilizing a single core and the second test using the power of multiple cores to render the benchmark image.




While results are generally close in Cinebench, the MSI K9A, based on the ATI Xpress 3200 chipset, tops both Single-Core and Dual-Core test results. The MSI RD580 is followed closely by the ASUS 590SLI, the ECS KA3 which is also based on the RD580, and the NVIDIA 570SLI based Epox MF570SLI. POV-Ray results are extremely close across DDR2 platforms and show the Gigabyte and ASUS to be the top performers. The ATI chipset boards are reversed in POV-Ray, with all 3 RD580 boards at the bottom of a tightly clustered performance pack.

3D Graphics

The 3DMark benchmarks, published by Futuremark, are probably the most widely quoted gaming performance benchmarks available. While the benchmarks are based on game sequences written by Futuremark to reveal subtle differences in gaming performance, they still have to be considered synthetic benchmarks. They are useful for broad Graphics comparisons, but they are no substitute for benchmarks with real gaming engines that are currently being played.



The MSI K9A managed to place in the top of 3DMark05 performance, while the ECS was one of the poorer performers in the AM2 test group. After topping PCMark2005 it was a surprise to see the MSI, ASUS, Epox, and ECS nailing down the bottom of 3DMark06 performance. Results were close, differences were minor, but neither the MSI nor ECS distinguished themselves in this newest 3DMark benchmark.

Encoding

We have found encoding results are not affected by the graphics card used during the encoding benchmarks, which should come as no surprise since theoretically this is to be expected. This is demonstrated again and again by archive test results for AutoGK using an AMD 4000+ processor with a wide assortment of video cards. The performance range of encoding tests over 2 years with the same CPU is just 48.1 to 49.1 - a difference form high to low of just 1.0 frame. Clearly the biggest influence on this encoding benchmark is the CPU used for testing. Because encoding test results vary so little on the same standardized motherboard test platform, they have been dropped from motherboard reviews. Encoding tests are very useful in CPU testing, but they have been shown to be poor motherboard tests - particularly on the AMD platforms with the memory controller on the CPU.